


Haunted

by paradiamond



Category: Turn (TV 2014)
Genre: Anna helps herself, F/M, Simcoe needs help, past stalking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-19
Updated: 2015-04-19
Packaged: 2018-03-24 21:07:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,227
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3784345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paradiamond/pseuds/paradiamond
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the wake of the Battle of Setauket Anna finds herself isolated from the town and increasingly aware of the prisoner being kept in the cellar.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Haunted

It’s the sun streaming through the little window in her room at the tavern that wakes her up like it does almost every morning now. 

Anna blinks, throwing an arm over her eyes with a most unladylike grunt. Back at Strong Manor her room faced the other direction and had thick, lovely curtains to block out the sun when it set. Now the curtains are thin and useless, the light passing right through them. She and Selah never bothered to make the upstairs rooms in the tavern too nice, never thinking that they would need them for much of anything. 

“Hindsight,” Anna sighs and swings her feet over the side of the bed, staying there for a moment before getting up all the way. She drifts through her room on bare feet, trying to ignore the ever present chill that runs up her spine as she gets dressed. When she goes downstairs for the day Mr. Djong seems to look right through her. 

“Table near the window starting early today,” he says, pointing to one of their regulars. Anna simply nods, satisfied for now to be quiet and compliant, it helps keep her out of the direct sight. When she puts the drink in front of the bleary-eyed man, he doesn’t look up either. She goes back to the kitchen and stays there, not even considering going out. 

Anna rarely leaves the tavern anymore. She wakes up in her little room above the tavern proper, goes to work for the day, then retreats back to the small piece of private space left to her in the wake of her husband’s choices. Her self-imposed exile was a gradual slide that began the day she jumped out of her husband’s boat and swam back to shore, thinking of the cause, of the adventure, of Abe. What she didn’t think about were the other consequences. 

She didn’t think about the stares, or about the other people in town calling her a deserter of her husband. The few friends she has left try to make light of the situation she finds herself in. One went so far as to say how jealous she was that Anna could live and work all in the same place, how convenient that must be for her. Anna smiled tightly at her and went back home, stayed there for days. 

She didn’t think about the fact that Abe would be returning to his family. In the aftermath of the attack, Abe moved back to the big house with Mary and their child. Safe, and much closer to town, but somehow farther away from Anna than he had ever been. 

She didn’t think about Captain Simcoe. 

As she was being led back to town by Abe and the rest of those that had followed the rebels to the shore, soaking wet and freezing in her heavy dress, she sees him being moved rather forcefully by three guards in the direction of the tavern. Anna had frozen where she stood, causing a soldier to walk into her from behind. He protests but she barely notices, still staring at Simcoe’s struggling form, gagged and missing his wig. He doesn’t seem to see her, doesn’t seem to take notice of anything apart from his captors. 

“What the- what happened?” Anna stammers, both fear and relief coursing through her in a rush. The soldier next to her shrugs but calls out to a passing officer, who pauses, clearly eager to be the bearer of this news. 

He steps closer to them, glancing around to make sure everyone is listening to his satisfaction. “The good Captain had some kind of fit, dragged the traitor Brewster outside the church and shot him dead in front of the rebels. Almost caused an outright battle. The Major had to have him bound and gagged, he was screaming something awful.” 

Anna listens and finds that she could imagine it all perfectly. Simcoe pulling Brewster from the church, the cold look on his face as he killed him. She shivers, and suddenly Abe is there again. 

“Anna? Are you too cold?” he looks so plainly concerned, and she wants to turn to him, but she knows that somewhere in the crowd his wife and father are there and she just can’t. 

“No I’m fine,” she answers, still watching as they finally get Simcoe through the door. “Did you see what happened with Captain Simcoe?” 

Abe makes a face. “Yes and it was terrible. I wouldn’t worry though, he’ll be in the same prison poor old Brewster was in and then god willing the Major will finally get rid of him.” 

“Yes.” Anna nods. “God willing.” 

They have to separate after that, Abe going back to his life and Anna back to the tavern. The Major says goodbye to her personally, though he seems understandably distracted by the chaos that has yet to leave the town and so is she. She hesitates at the tavern door, afraid that the soldiers won’t have been able to get Simcoe out the back door yet. 

She sees she was right when she eases the door open to find the Captain still struggling against his restraints near the center of the room. He looks like a wild animal, and the sight is so shocking the door slips from her fingers to slam back into the frame. Simcoe whirls around to face her, effectively shaking off one of the three men. He clearly sees her then, his eyes widening with shock and maybe embarrassment and he freezes entirely, allowing one of the soldiers to get the better of him. The other man lands a punch straight to Simcoe’s stomach and he doubles over in pain, his legs giving out from underneath him. 

Anna feels an unnecessary burst of guilt at the sight and has to restrain herself from doing or saying anything. She reminds herself that he deserves what he gets. Anything that happens to him from here on out is his own doing. The knowledge doesn’t make it any easier to watch. They haul Simcoe up by his arms and his eyes immediately finds hers again, bright and sharply focused. 

Anna finds she can’t breathe or respond while he looks at her, all the fear and dark curiosity she had ever felt around him seeming to hit her all at once. She stands rooted to the spot. And he doesn’t look away, not even as they physically drag him to the back door, the look in his eyes taking on an acutely desperate shine. They pull him through the door and towards the cellar, and Anna finds herself pulled along with them. Simcoe cranes his neck to look at her, still standing in the doorway in the relative safety of the tavern, still dripping wet and miserable. He doesn’t smile like she half expects him to. 

The officer put his hand on the top of Simcoe’s head, forcing him to face front and pushing him down, and he disappears into the total darkness of the cellar. 

The cellar door slams shut and Anna jumps in spite of herself. Her heart seems to be trying to flee from her chest, competing with her headache for the most painful sensation in her body. She leaves before she has to see it open again. 

***

As the weeks pass Anna begins to stay in the tavern and Simcoe stays in the cellar. 

Though the gossip about his arrest has mostly died down, she’s keenly aware of the fact that he’s always there, always right underneath her feet as she works, always beneath her as she tries to sleep at night. Perhaps it’s the surety she has that he thinks of her often that stops her from forgetting about him the way she wants to. Despite the fact that she knows he can’t possibly see her, the feeling of being watched doesn’t go away. 

It goes on for weeks. When she’s brushing her hair, when she’s cleaning the floor, when she’s laying awake at night. She has the disturbing sense that he always knows exactly what she’s doing at any given time. It’s clearly impossible but she feels it down to her bones. 

“If this is what you meant when you said you would look after me,” she mutters to herself as she scrubs the glasses in the sink. “I don’t want it.” She never had. 

“What’s that Anna?” Mr. Djong asks as he walk into the kitchen. 

She doesn’t turn. “Nothing Mr. Djong.” She grips the glass harder, half hoping that it would break. It doesn’t. 

“We’re almost out of glasses, the soldiers keep breaking them. And we need more rags and the extra broom. Be a dear and go down to the cellar and fetch them,” he says, and leaves the room before she has even a second to protest. 

She spins to find him gone, and Anna stops breathing for a horrible moment. Most of the day-to-day supplies had been taken out of the cellar when they first started using it as the makeshift prison, but some of them, including the long term stock of glasses, were still down there with Captain Simcoe and whatever guard they have posted down there at any given time. She can’t imagine there is much security now, not after this long without an incident. 

One of her many recurring nightmares involves the patient and resilient Captain Simcoe biding his time to eventually escape from his bonds. From there he makes his way up to her room to ask her to escape with him. Simcoe has always seen what he wants to see in her and nothing else. Knowing what she knows about him and the way he thinks, she knows her only real options would be to agree or to fight, and she wouldn’t win. Those sort of dreams usually result in her waking up in a cold sweat, and going down the stairs to check on Simcoe’s door the way he used to do with hers. 

The same cold sweat starts to overtake her now, and she wipes at her forehead. For a moment she genuinely considers tracking Cicero down and telling him to do it for her, but the thought of sending a thirteen year old boy to do something because she was too scared to be in a same space as a well-constrained man is too much for her pride, so she goes, taking a box with her so she can have something to hold on her way to keep her hands from shaking too badly. She goes through the back door and into the sunlight. It blinds her for a moment and she put up her free hand to shield her eyes, taking the time to admire the flowers that had started to come up near the fence. Stalling. 

There’s a bored looking guard sitting by the cellar door who eyes Anna with minimal interest as she approaches. He doesn’t even seem to be paying attention. “Mrs. Strong,” he nods to her. 

“Sir,” she says, unsure of his name. “I need to go into the cellar.” 

The guard just nods and waves a hand in the vague direction of the door, not even asking her for a reason. Anna feels torn between laughing and screaming, so she does neither. She opens the already unlocked door and takes her first steps into the cellar that she used to nearly own. At least she owned it more than most people, now she just drifts through the space like a ghost, touching nothing, leaving no trace as she passes. 

She tries to banish her maudlin thoughts as she goes down the stairs, eyeing the end of them with anticipation. The rest of the prisoners are long gone, either released or hanged, and there have been no new ones since the near-battle of Setauket. The people seem content to be complacent for now, Captain Simcoe the last living reminder that things had gone so wrong, and it seems that even his own guards don’t bother to remember him very much these days. The cellar is a big space, but it’s occupied by only Simcoe and a lone guard who almost looks to be sleeping. Anna pays him little attention, her eye drawn to Simcoe’s slumped form. She doesn’t know what she imagined, but it wasn’t this. 

Simcoe looks bad, his weeks of imprisonment showing clearly in his gaunt face and thin frame. He’s sitting on the ground now, but Anna can see the marks on his wrists from where his shackles had scraped his skin while they hung him by his arms from the rafter. His wig had been returned to him at some point, no doubt he had insisted, but it’s in poor condition and it looks ridiculous. His uniform is filthy, he clearly hadn’t had a change of clothes in all the time he’d been locked up. The smell is awful. 

“Need something?” the guard calls out finally, making her realize that she had been standing at the bottom of the stairs in silence for too long. 

“I just-” She holds the box up, still looking at Simcoe. The guard waves her forward. Simcoe looks up at the sound of her voice, head snapping up so fast it makes her own neck hurt to see it. 

She tries to move forward, but the look on his face made her stop in her tracks once again. Not out of the fear she had been prepared for, but out of surprise. He looks so genuinely happy to see her, tears in the corner of his eyes, leaning forward towards her like a flower leaning into the sun. 

She leans back in return, stunned. She suddenly remembers that when he returned from his capture the first time he said that the only thing that enabled him to endure torture was the thought of returning to her. Anna glances at the guard, who looks away, clearly uncomfortable at the display. He doesn’t say anything. 

“Mrs. Strong- Anna,” Simcoe calls out, straining against his chains, and his voice is hoarse and weak from disuse. Anna winces it hear it, especially the sickly hope in his tone. “Have you come to visit me?”

“No,” Anna answers truthfully, clutching at the box she has to fill. Then, without knowing why, she continues. Maybe it’s the way his face crumples. “You aren’t allowed to have visitors.” 

Simcoe nods seriously, blank faced and unblinking. “Of course.” The guard growls at him to stop talking, and Anna has never felt so grateful to enemy in all her life. 

Simcoe stays silent, but he proceeds to watch her move about the space, collecting the things Mr. Djong had sent her for without seeing them. Her box grows heavier, but Anna doesn’t show any sign of strain, remembering Simcoe carrying the barrel of ale up the stairs for her with a surge of anger. She doesn’t look at him but he never looks away. Before today she had thought that his imagined ghost staring was bad enough, but it didn’t hold a candle to the real thing. She can feel his eyes like a physical touch wherever she goes. 

She glances at him from the corner of her eye, curious in spite of herself. Anna knows there’s something dangerously wrong with him. She’s always felt it, but never more so than right now when she finally sees him with clear eyes. She’s always understood that Simcoe wants her. If she had shown any sign of weakness that day in the storeroom Anna knows he would have dragged her down to the floor and taken her like an animal. He might have opened her door one night after standing outside of it if they hadn’t arranged to have him killed. He could have done those things, but Anna sees now that he also loves her in whatever dark way he can. It’s bleak, and it’s not a kind of love she recognizes, but it’s there. Maybe it’s all the love he can manage, raw as he is. 

He always says that he wants to defend her, to protect her. But she can see in his eyes that what he really wants if for her to save him, to make all the things he had done alright. It was when she stopped him from firing on Abe at the duel that she first noticed. When she told him not to shoot he looked at her like she had set him free. Maybe she had. She knows that he wants her to do it again. 

Anna retrieves the last item, heart pounding as she put it in her little box. She fears that if she ever has to do this again it might kill her before Captain Simcoe ever gets the chance. She turns to leave, but he stops her. “Anna.” She glances over at him, trying not to move much. He grimaces, though perhaps he’s trying for a smile. 

“I never wanted for you to see me like this." He shakes his head. "Do you hate me?” Simcoe calls out, his voice wavering slightly, quieter than Anna had ever heard it. “Please, I need to know.” 

The guard yells at him to be quiet, apparently having reached his limit of patience for emotional displays. He brandishes his gun and threatens to lash him again, but Simcoe keeps his gaze fixed on Anna, eyes wide and frighteningly honest. 

She grips the box tighter to stop her shaking but she makes herself look up and meet his eyes. “No,” she says, realizing that it’s true. “I don’t hate you.” 

She pities him. 

***

The next day she goes to Major Hewlett and tells him everything. 

She tell him about the things Simcoe said, about hearing him outside her door, about how she fears for her safety whenever he’s around so Hewlett will send him away after his court martial. It’s easier to do than she had thought, the act not so hard to manage when it’s basically the truth. The shaking and faintheartedness come easily to her that day, perhaps because she had been suppressing it for too long. 

Hewlett doesn’t look right through her like the others do when she talks, his horrified expression fixed on her own. So much attention after her long isolation makes her more uncomfortable than she would like to admit, but she presses forward, determined to make him send Simcoe far away. She might not have the power to do it herself, but she has the ability to make this man do it for her. 

It works, Hewlett promises her that he will see to it that Simcoe never returns to their town, that he will defend her in this. 

“You don’t have to be afraid anymore Mrs. Strong,” Hewlett tells her earnestly, his hand curling around the handle of his decorative sword as though he thinks he can slay her ghosts with it that easily. Anna knows better. 

She smiles at him anyway, and he beams back. “Thank you Major, I truly appreciate it.” 

Hewlett nearly trips over his feet to walk her to the church door, going on about law and authority and the corrupting influence of drink and loose morals. Anna barely hears him, but she feels better than she has in weeks. He stops at the door and wishes her a good day, but doesn’t leave when she walks away. His gaze doesn’t feel quite so sinister, and Anna finds she’s not bothered by it. The sun feels good on her face that day, and the air smells good. 

She takes a detour on her way back to the tavern to stop in the local shop, and doesn’t feel so insubstantial. 

Anna spends the rest of her day on two sewing projects using the fabric she had bought at the shop, one for her and one for Cicero, who had come to her the day before, right after she had to go down into the cellar, to ask for advice about something he could send to his mother with the little money had had been able to save. Anna knows that he’s being paid half of what she receives, and she barely gets paid at all, so she had been impressed but not hopeful about the idea and told him as much. Her bleak assessment hadn’t daunted him at all. 

“Sometimes things have to get worse before they get better, that what my mama always says,” he says with total confidence. 

“I suppose you’re right,” Anna couldn’t help but smile at him. “Really Cicero, when did you get so smart?” 

Cicero just shrugged, grinning. “I’ve always been smart ma’am, you just never noticed.” 

She felt ashamed of herself then, and has to admit now that she had been wrong in her concerns for him. Freedom seems to have only made him stronger, even without his mother. The ability to make his own decisions seems to have made all the difference. 

It feels good to do something with her hands that isn’t just pouring drinks or scrubbing glasses. She runs her hands over the fabric and smiles. “That’ll do.” She says to herself, and holds her project up to the sun. She hadn’t thought about Captain Simcoe for hours by the time she goes to bed, but her dreams that night are still haunted. 

***

She only sees Simcoe one more time after their encounter in the cellar, but she makes sure that he doesn’t see her. 

Hewlett had made good on his promises. It’s the day of Simcoe’s transfer out of Setauket, and he’s led from the cellar still in chains, blinking like a newborn animal in the bright sun after so long in the dark. She struck again by how terrible he looks, all filthy and ragged. If Anna’s mother were there she would have said that the outside of wicked men always come to reflect their rotten insides. The divine has a way of letting people who the wicked among them are, and today Anna believes it. 

She stands at the corner of the shop across the street and watches him find his footing and immediately look up, towards her window. Anna freezes, suddenly terrified. She holds her breath until he looks away, thinking of the surety of the movement, of all the times he might have looked up at the exact same place at night while she slept. Nothing would have stopped him, so he would have done it. 

He looks for what feels to her is a long time, but it can’t have been more than a few seconds. When he doesn’t find here there he looks around the street, but she’s already taken a step back into the shadows, uncaring of the people who might take notice of her strange behavior. She has darker spirits to deal with today. 

Two of Hewlett’s men lead him from the cellar to the docks with Anna following silently behind them. It’s a risk, but she knows that she has to see him go. She has to see him get on the ship and she has to see it sail away. 

None of them speak as they walk, and thankfully no one tries to talk to Anna as she makes her way from shadow to shadow, moving behind carts and keeping to the tree line. As they get closer to the docks it’s clear that Simcoe is getting more and more agitated, his searching glances getting increasingly frequent and blatantly obvious. One of the guards pushes him forward sharply when Simcoe pauses for a second too long at the seam between the ground and the dock, sending him down to one knee. He hardly seems to notice. Anna sees it all from behind a tree near the far right end of the docks, and doesn’t move. 

They haul him up by the arms and drag him forward, towards the ship that will carry him away to Philadelphia. He says something to them, but Anna doesn’t hear. The wind takes it. It doesn’t matter anyway, the guards ignore him. He looks back towards the town one last time and it seems that the fight has finally gone out of him. He lets himself be led down into the darkness of the ship, head bowed, defeat evident in every line of his body. 

Anna stands straighter, leaning forward to get a better view. 

The ship gets loaded with supplies, the Captain yells orders she doesn’t understand, and it leaves, getting smaller and smaller until it finally disappears. Anna watches and feels nothing at all. Simcoe may love her, he may need some imagined version of her, but Anna is sure he would have killed her in the end when he found out she couldn’t save him the way he needed to be saved. 

She stays and watches the boat for a long time, longer than she should given her duties, but she finds that it’s hard to leave. Part of her expects to see the ship coming back, the nightmare never ending, but it doesn’t. After a while Anna nods to herself and goes home, the sun low at her back by the time she gets there. 

That night Anna sleeps just fine, and the new curtains with embroidered leaves she had sewn for herself keep the sun out of her eyes when she wakes.

**Author's Note:**

> Follow me on tumblr if you want :)  
> http://paradiamond.tumblr.com/


End file.
